Canadian iconoclasm“It seems as plain as a poke in your eye that the CBC is being bludgeoned because the Conservative Party finds its reporting suspect, but the angle of attack is an ugly prurience about salaries and perks,” TheGlobe and Mail‘s John Doyle sniffs. He most benevolently concedes that “a reasonable argument can made that, as it is in part taxpayer-funded, the CBC should release salary details for its employees,” but he worries about the “precedent being set,” now that the barbarians have breached Ottawa’s fortifications. “After the witch hunt against the CBC, who’s next? Museums, obviously. And then what? Theatres and publishers who receive grants from the government? Every TV show produced in Canada with the help of taxpayer money?” Well — yeah. Hopefully. When it comes to spending taxpayer money, no level of disclosure is too minute. If your organization can’t withstand sunlight, can’t make a case for itself, maybe you have a problem on your hands.

Andrew Cohen, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, derides the National Capital Commission’s nationwide how-to-improve-Ottawa roadshow, and the NCC’s long-term efforts to spiff up the city for Canada’s bicentennial in general. So they commissioned a poll that found Canadians “like” Ottawa. So what? “If Canadians love Ottawa, they wouldn’t let their federal government build row on row of insipid buildings that have made downtown — beyond the magnificent parliamentary precinct — look like a Prairie outpost. The government throws up third-rate office towers because it knows that Canadians don’t want to spend money making their national capital a showplace.” Well, yeah. Exactly. We often say this in response to Cohen’s woe-is-us columns, but we’ll say it again: What if the modern parts of Canadian cities are architecturally dull not by accident, but because that’s who we are? Don’t we laud ourselves as the country of appropriately leveraged banks and fiscal rectitude? Why would such a country conduct business in a modern architectural wonder?

As appalling as it is to hear politicians talk as if Parliament’s “sole function is to convert a minority of the popular vote … into a majority of the seats,” as if the idea of coalition governance is not just undesirable but illegitimate, Andrew Coyne argues it is more or less in keeping with the sad reality: “Isn’t it true that MPs are elected almost entirely on the basis of party? Don’t they owe their seats to the party leader?” Maclean’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards operate “on the theory that if we treat MPs as somebodies, they will no longer be content to be nobodies,” says Coyne. But someone is going to have to “give power back to the MPs,” and that won’t happen, he says, until until “party members and riding associations … insist their MPs be accountable to them, rather than the leadership.” Over to you, Liberal rebuilders.

The squalid conditions on First Nations reserves like Attawapiskat must be addressed immediately, of course, but the National Post‘s John Ivison sees very few realistic prospects for long-term success for such places. “There are no economic reasons for Attawapiskat to exist,” he argues, and as such, the aboriginal poverty solution du jour — property rights — is pretty much a non-starter. “For reserves with a minimal tax base and little additional revenue, the capital gap is to wide to bridge,” says Ivison. “The real killer is remoteness.”

Duly noted“Snitching is the right thing to do in every conceivable sense if you see a child being sodomized,” Barbara Amiel writes in Maclean’s on the Penn State hideousness, “but to create another class of criminals for not snitching doesn’t seem helpful.” Mandatory reporting laws “won’t deter sexual predators,” she suggests, “but commit resources to non-productive areas.” OK. But surely those laws aren’t meant to deter sexual predators, but rather the covering up of sexual predation. It’s mind-boggling that, in 2002, PSU officials made the decisions they allegedly made. A couple of prison terms might knock some sense into any other university administrators considering a cover-up.

Irwin Cotler, writing in the Citizen, demands the international community drop an R2P bomb on Syria forthwith — specifically a Security Council resolution on the matter, followed by “the deployment of an Arab League protective force to stop the killing, the provision of badly needed humanitarian assistance and relief, the implementation of no-fly and no-drive zones, and broad-based support for the Syrian National Council, the nascent Syrian representative body.”

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